Laravel 4 Automaton Task Scheduler

Automaton is a task Scheduler for Laravel 4 designed to run as a CronJob. It's designed to run resource intensive tasks with PHP CLI while providing a user friendly way to track down the execution of the tasks.

The planned tasks are stored in a database table, and are 'sandboxed' so any exception occuring will be logged into the database for easier debugging.

Installation

Add this into require-dev in your composer.json file:

"require-dev" : {
	...
	"plateau/automaton": "dev-master"
}

Run an update:

php composer.phar update

Register the console service provider in app/config/app.php:

'providers' => array(
	...
	'Plateau\Automaton\AutomatonServiceProvider',
);

Register the facade :

	'Automaton' => 'Plateau\Automaton\AutomatonFacade',
);

Run migrations

php artisan migrate --package=plateau/automaton

Usage

Configure your crontab to run Automaton at a regular interval :

* * * * * php /var/www/laravel-app/artisan automaton:run >/dev/null 2>&1

Create a task class that contains your logic :

use Plateau\Automaton\AbstractTask;

class MyTask extends AbstractTask {
	
	public function fire()
	{
		// Task logic
	}
}

Schedule your task :

// Parameters are accessible from the task object as $this->parameters
$parameters = array('key' => 'value');

$myTask = new MyTask;
$myTask->init($parameters);

Automaton::schedule($myTask, '2014-02-17 12:00:00');

Alternatively you can pass a Carbon object for setting the date :

Automaton::schedule($myTask, Carbon::now->addHours(2));

Scheduling Cron Jobs

If you need your tasks to be run at regular intervals, you can pass cron expression to the scheduler :

// Run a task every minute
Automaton::cron($myTask, '* * * * *');

Happy Coding!